M.Phil. Thesis ( May 1999) the UNINTELLIGIBILITY OF
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M.Phil. thesis ( May 1999) THE UNINTELLIGIBILITY OF SCEPTICISM RESURRECTED BY MARC WALLACH THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS UMI Number: U615435 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U615435 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I would like to thank Dr. Jeff Ketland for his patient supervision and Kate Huddie for the thankless task of proof reading which she performed meticulously. ion<u> TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. ABSTRACT 1 2. INTRODUCTION 2 3. SCEPTICISM 13 4. MOORE’S ‘DEFENCE OF COMMON SENSE’ 31 4.1 MOORE’S ‘PROOF OF AN EXTERNAL WORLD 45 5. WITTGENSTEIN AND THE NONSENSE OF THE SCEPTIC 53 5. CONCLUSION 90 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY THE UNINTELLIGIBILITY OF SCEPTICISM RESURRECTED ABSTRACT Scepticism about the external world is the view that all our everyday and scientific beliefs are epistemically on a par. Scepticism does not deny that we have true beliefs, only that we have any rational justification for accepting them as true. In this thesis I examine the claim that what passes for the doctrine of scepticism is in fact incoherent. My thesis consists of four sections. In the introduction I briefly discuss and reject the naturalist’s response to scepticism. In the second section, I introduce the sceptical argument and defend it as a philosophical extension of our ordinary epistemic practices. In the third section, I examine G E Moore’s famous anti- sceptical papers, which I eventually reject. The final part of my thesis looks at Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (OC), in which he wrestles with the idea of the intelligibility of scepticism. The claim that scepticism, or indeed any philosophical position, is unintelligible is not easy to establish and I do not think Wittgenstein demonstrates that it is so. Nevertheless, I do think he pushes scepticism to a point where it is difficult to see how it could occupy any conceptual space in our intellectual lives. 1 INTRODUCTION Philosophical scepticism is the view that there can be no good grounds for believing that we know anything about the external physical world. The phrase ‘Knowledge of the external world’ covers “not only all the natural sciences and all of history, it covers all everyday, unsystematic factual claims belonging to no particular investigative discipline”.1 It therefore threatens all our beliefs about the world and, in consequence, the concept of reality that goes with it. Importantly, the truth of scepticism is compatible with all our beliefs being true, but deprives us of any rational reason for accepting them as so. Philosophical scepticism is not, of course, the only type of scepticism, but it is the most universal and hence the most radical. Bas van Fraassen2 for example, is sceptical about the unobservable entities postulated by scientific theories. He thinks that science gives us insufficient reason to believe in unobservable objects like ‘spin’, ‘electron’, or ‘quark’, remaining agnostic about their reality. He does not, however, express any doubt in beliefs about the observable world. Rather unobservable objects are introduced to explain the phenomena of the observable world. Indeed, it would be absurd to maintain that we lacked justification for believing in observable objects but had good reason for believing in unobservable ones. 1 Williams 1996, p. 103 2 van Fraassen 1980 2 The sceptical claim is a conclusion and not a self-evident premise. This means it is the result of argument and, therefore, its appeal cannot lie in the sceptical claim itself, but rather in the steps leading up to it. This no doubt explains the often-cited analogy between the sceptical argument and Zeno’s paradoxes of motion.3 The sceptic presents us with acceptable arguments that entail a completely unacceptable conclusion. The question is, what is the right diagnosis of the argument? In this thesis I look at Moore and Wittgenstein’s arguments for the unintelligibility of scepticism. Of course, they are not the only anti-sceptical arguments, but Wittgenstein’s, in particular, is one that I find most compelling and attractive. But let me first say something about two alternative anti-sceptical replies. One very influential anti-sceptical response is thought to be provided by a ‘naturalised epistemology’, a program initiated by Quine. Quine’s own answer to scepticism is ambiguous, but his writings influenced a new way of approaching epistemology and, in turn, how we might refute the traditional sceptical problem. Quine (1977) expresses this new approach like this: Epistemology is best looked upon, then, as an enterprise within natural science. Cartesian doubt is not the way to begin. Retaining our present beliefs about nature, we can still ask how we can have arrived at them. Science tells us that our only source of information about the external world is through the impact of light rays and molecules upon our sensory surfaces. Stimulated in these ways, we somehow evolve an elaborate and useful science. How do we do this, and why does the resulting science work so well? These are genuine questions, and no feigning a doubt is needed to appreciate them. They are scientific questions about a species of 3 Stroud 1984 p. 139; Williams op.c/Ypp.xviii. primates, and they are open to investigation in natural science, the very science whose acquisition is being investigated (Quine NNK, p68). The problems of epistemology are scientific and subject to the same standards governing theory appraisal in the sciences, such as simplicity, explanatory depth, avoiding ad hoc explanations or the ability to make novel and successful predictions. This view of epistemology leads Quine to treat even the existence of physical bodies as a hypothesis ‘conceptually imported’ and ‘comparable to the gods of Homer’4. The difference between belief in physical bodies and Homer’s gods is that the former best explains the sensory evidence and provides a better ‘device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’. According to this new conception of epistemology, then, scepticism is to be treated as a theory, and tested according to our current methodological prescriptions and against our best scientific candidates. A recent attempt at discrediting scepticism this way is Jonathan Vogel’s paper ‘Cartesian Skepticism and Inference to the Best Explanation’5. Vogel does not actually pit scepticism against any sophisticated scientific theory but against a ‘scientifically unsophisticated common-sense view of the world’ (p. 3 53), by which he means that the visual and tactile impressions we receive are caused by certain objects having certain properties and standing in genuine causal relations with each other. Scepticism, he says, “questions our ability to read off the “real” or intrinsic character of things from those things’ causal behavior” (p.355). Vogel’s strategy is to show how our 4 Quine 1987 5 Vogel 1998 4 unsophisticated common-sense view of the world better explains the content of our experiences than does the sceptical hypothesis. There is no need to go into the details of Vogel’s argument since my objection to it is a general one. Both Quine and Vogel fail to see a difference in status between scientific theories and certain everyday propositions. That there is a distinction is something to which G E Moore was particularly sensitive: Suppose, that now, instead of saying, “I am inside a building”, I were to say “ I think I’m inside a building”, but perhaps I’m not: it’s not certain that I am, or instead of saying “ I have got some clothes on”, I were to say “ I think I’ve got some clothes on, but it’s just possible that I haven’t”. (Moore 1957 pp227-228) Moore is surely correct. It would be absurd to doubt the above remarks, while no such absurdity results from saying ‘I think electrons exist, but I’m not certain, it is possible that they don’t’. We saw, for example, how van Fraassen is agnostic about unobservables, which is just to say that he is not certain that they do exist. The difference in status between the two kinds of beliefs is due to the absence of evidence for Moore’s statements. Scientific hypothesis is revisable, which need not be considered a fault but a virtue since it allows one theory to be replaced by a better theory resulting in scientific progress. It is not clear however just what kind of evidence could falsify Moore’s remarks. In fact, it is not even clear what the supporting evidence could be either. We might think perceiving that Moore has clothes on fulfills this evidential role, but if a person does not know whether he or someone standing in front of him is wearing clothes or not, then we are more likely to conclude 5 there is a problem with his vision, rather than accept his doubt. Similarly with refuting evidence, anything that appeared to contradict Moore’s claim to be certain that he has clothes on would most likely be rejected and explained away. We must be careful here. Whatever the nature of this certainty, certainty is not the same as knowledge. One can be as certain as one likes and still be wrong, while if one knows, it follows conceptually that he cannot be wrong.